Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Funding Discussion board, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Could 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the corporate will doubtless have to construct a “gigantic” semiconductor fabrication plant to maintain up with its synthetic intelligence and robotics ambitions.
“One of many issues I am making an attempt to determine is — how can we make sufficient chips?” Musk stated at Tesla’s annual shareholders assembly Thursday.
Tesla at present depends on contract chipmakers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm and Samsung Electronics to supply its chip designs. Musk stated he was additionally contemplating working with U.S. chip firm Intel.
“However even once we extrapolate the best-case situation for chip manufacturing from our suppliers, it is nonetheless not sufficient,” he stated.
Tesla would most likely have to construct a “gigantic” chip fab, which Musk described as a “Tesla terra fab.” “I can not see another approach to get to the quantity of chips that we’re on the lookout for.”
Microchips are the brains that energy virtually all fashionable applied sciences, together with every little thing from shopper electronics like smartphones to huge information facilities, and demand for them has been surging amid the AI increase.
Tech giants, together with Tesla, have been clamoring for extra provide from chipmakers like TSMC — the world’s largest and most superior chipmaker.
In line with Musk, Tesla’s potential fab’s preliminary capability would attain 100,000 wafer begins per 30 days and ultimately scale as much as 1 million. Within the semiconductor business, wafer begins per 30 days is a measure of what number of new chips a fab produces every month.
For comparability, TSMC says its annual wafer manufacturing capability reached 17 million in 2024, or round 1.42 million wafer begins per 30 days.
Whereas Tesla would not but manufacture its personal microchips, the corporate has been designing customized chips for autonomous driving for a number of years.
It’s at present outsourcing manufacturing of its latest-generation “AI5” chip, which Musk stated might be cheaper, power-efficient, and optimized for Tesla’s AI software program.
The CEO additionally introduced on Thursday that Tesla will start producing its Cybercab — an autonomous electrical automobile with no pedals or steering wheel — in April.
Musk’s statements underscore Tesla’s shift into AI and robotics — industries the CEO sees as the way forward for the worldwide economic system.
“With AI and robotics, you may truly enhance the worldwide economic system by an element of 10, or perhaps 100. There’s not, like, an apparent restrict,” Musk stated on the shareholder assembly.